Gnarly Trombone: The mouse may be cute, but let's move it to Nebraska

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Well, you see, there’s this mouse.

It’s cute, like most mice are, and has a little stripe down his back, and he lives outdoors by the streams and mostly eats bugs and grass and stuff like that. And he sleeps all winter, like a hibernating bear, which is another cute thing for a mouse.

And everybody hates him. Well, maybe not EVERYBODY.

You see, there’s a lot of politics involved with this cute mouse, and while one side wants to save him and let him live wherever he wants, the other side would rather see him dead.

Well, to be fair, maybe they don’t want him dead. They just don’t want him to be protected from death anymore.

He’s actually called the Preble’s Meadow Jumping Mouse, also known as Zapus Hudonius Preblei, and he lives only along the Front Range in Colorado and Wyoming, and even though he can jump 8 feet high, he’s causing some problems.

Well, you see, Zapus (we’ll call the cute little mouse “Zapus” after his scientific name because it’s cuter than just “Mouse”), though he’s tiny and sleeps about eight months of the year, lives somewhere along the streams and rivers, and because there apparently aren’t very many of the cute mice, Zapus is endangered.

Because he’s “endangered,” it means we people can’t do anything that would risk exterminating Zapus. Which might include cleaning up after the flood from last year.

And to many people, “endangered” is a dirty word. It means, if the feds come in and find some of the Zapuses sleeping along our rivers where it flooded last year, we can’t rebuild the houses that were lost in the flood.

Well, something has to be done. But it’s against the law to kill the cute little mouse, so we don’t want to do that.

Scene: State Penitentiary

Your cellmate, Throat-Ripper Jones: “I’m in here for robbing 28 banks and stealing 35 cars and killing about a thousand people! What are you in for?”

You: “Killing a cute little mouse.”

Throat-Ripper: “O-o-o-o-o. I’m scared!”

So, obviously, you don’t want to end up in jail for killing a cute little mouse.

So, what do we do? Well, if you intensely study the problem for about eight minutes, like I did, the answer is simple:

Move them.

That’s all! We don’t want to hurt cute little Zappy, so we just gently move him.

Here’s how we do it: We get a whole bunch of Mouse Finders, (probably federal government workers, because they get paid more than the rest of us) and walk slowly and gently along the stream banks and gently gather up every cute little mouse while they are hibernating. We put them on little pillows, so we don’t disturb their sleep (probably because that’s another violation of federal laws) and gently place them on a government bus.

And we move them out.

Now, where is the best place to move them…

Fort Collins? Nope, even though they deserve another government problem, it’s too close and the mice would find their way back here.

Boulder? Probably the best place, because they love endangered species, but the Boulderites would treat them so well, they’d probably multiply and become an over-population problem.

Wait a minute … I know!

Nebraska! We people who love our neighboring state know that they’d like to have an endangered species living in their neighborhoods. And, they could move them into Lincoln, Neb., and they could live with the Nebraska Huskers football team!

Another endangered species.

The name Gnarly Trombone was taken from an 1871 Cincinnati newspaper that misread Horace Greeley’s handwritten name of the Greeley Tribune. Mike Peters is a retired Tribune staff writer. He may be emailed at mpeters26@comcast.net.